In one man's class struggle, it's a victory by degrees

An academic exercise is softening the barriers between the Koreas, as Hamish McDonald reports from Yanji, north-east China.

Kim Chin Kyung has an unusual qualification to be heading a university in China's sensitive border region, next to reclusive North Korea.

"I am ashamed to say I am holding an American imperialist passport," he jokes.

Despite periodic battles with Chinese communist officialdom, the 67-year-old South Korean-born economist was cheerful this week as he handed out degrees and diplomas at the Yanbian University of Science and Technology, he founded 11 years ago and is now rated as one of China's top 100 universities. It has nearly 2000 students.

Nor has the US passport, service on the South Korean side of the Korean War, or a previous six-week spell in a North Korean interrogation cell deterred Dr Kim from an even less likely venture: building a matching science and technology university in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

This week's oddly moving graduation ceremony - in which about 200 mostly ethnic-Korean young people tipped their mortarboards to Dr Kim while a band played Land of Hope and Glory and other old Western marches - testified to ties of blood in the Korean diaspora, which help keep alive contacts and reunification dreams in their split homeland. ");document.write("

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Dr Kim said the university grew out of a vow he made during the Korean War.

He had tried to enlist in the South Korean army when war broke out in 1950, but was rejected because he was only 15.

Undeterred, he signed a petition in his own blood, and was allowed into a student battalion. As their numbers dwindled - only 17 of the 800 original student soldiers survived - he became a committed Christian and made a private bargain with God.

"If you save my life, I would like to live for my present enemies, the North Koreans and Chinese, to save their lives, not kill them," Dr Kim recalls.

He went back to school and university in Seoul, then studied at Bristol University, in Britain.

Seeing his South Korean passport and lack of money as barriers, he moved to Florida where over 18 years he built up a successful chain of fashion shops and gained his US passport and his doctorate.

Eventually, as China changed in the 1980s, he was invited to lecture in Beijing about South Korea's economy, and persuaded the then Chinese president, a veteran People's Liberation Army general, Yang Shangkun, to let him to set up a vocational college in this small city of 300,000 people. It is an hour's drive from the Tumen River border with North Korea, and capital of the Yanbian Special Autonomous Prefecture, which is home to half of China's 2 million ethnic Koreans.

The university is unusually closely knit. All students and staff live on campus and eat together in the same dining hall.

Many are from extremely poor families and are helped with bursaries and loans.

The closeness has sometimes met suspicion from Chinese security authorities, who still follow a rigid ideological agenda, and opened a site for public executions by firing squad only a year ago.

"From time to time they spy on us, sending in reporters from the Xinhua news agency," said Dr Kim.

Two years ago, such surveillance led the then Chinese leader to ask: "Is it a religious seminary?"

The security services were especially concerned about the system of individual tutors, and insisted that it be dropped, along with the university motto of "Truth, Love, Peace".

Still, there is a visible warmth: at the graduation, many students spontaneously hugged their professors on the stage after receiving their degrees.

Although most of the staff are devout Christians, and much of the money comes from church groups, Dr Kim is well aware that an overt Christian message is ruled out.

"But our students imitate their professors," he said. "They see something different in their nature, the atmosphere of the school."

Dr Kim has had a rougher time with the North Koreans. After opening an orphanage, now home to 455 children, he planned a college in North Korea's Rajin-Songbong special trading zone, just across the border.

All went well until the zone's officials were purged in 1998. On his next trip Dr Kim was arrested by the North Korean state security bureau, and over 42 days of interrogation accused of working for the CIA, advocating capitalism and trying to convert North Korean soldiers to Christianity.

He finally convinced them he had no hostile connections, and was acting only on his inner faith, he said.

His contact grew into an agreement in 2001, endorsed in a personal meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, for a new Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.